The Pain of Leaving…

It hurts. It hurts so bad. Not only me, but them too. Has anyone wrote about the pain of leaving a system, religion, or organization where you’ve placed all your security? The wildly beating heart? The fear of confrontation? The tremendous guilt when those you love are in unspeakable pain because of what you’ve done? Of going back to the decision time and time again to revisit and re-prove whether it still feels right or not? Oh dear one… if you have faced this, you understand, I know.

This will be a straight-from-the-heart post. So beware of the depth of emotion. Feelings can come in like a tidal wave and carry you places you weren’t planning to go. And me - I experience tidal waves on a regular basis. They sweep you off your feet and carry you up and down and sometimes it’s a while before you feel your feet on the ground again.

To leave anything you’ve built your life on is utterly terrifying. The questions come first, and every part of you tries its best to silence them, push them away. Slowly they get louder and louder until there is no ignoring them any longer. Finally you feel able to face them, but it’s so scary. Because if you ask questions, where will it take you? In the middle of all this you realize a lot of hard things - that maybe you didn’t know the truth completely. That maybe what you thought was strength was actually weakness. That maybe what you thought was love was actually fear… It is deeply humbling. You always were the one who had the answers. You were the one on the right track. After a while, the structures around you start to lose their appeal. They become empty and tasteless. You engage, but you feel so yucky afterward. You keep performing, but it gets harder and harder. You start to wonder if you will really need to walk away. Oh horror of horrors. You are absolutely petrified. You know if you do that, you will lose so much. You will lose the approval of the ones you love. You will lose your comfortable life, surrounded by friends and support. You will lose part of your rudder for a while. You won’t know where to go, and you’ll have very few people to lean on. The worst part? You love these people with your whole heart, and you have no desire to put them through the pain of fearing that you just signed your (eternal) death sentence. They love you too, you know they do. You know if you do this, everything will change. You will become that one family member that ruined everything. You will bear a label of judgment, and have experiences that will not let you forget that.

One day you realize you will not be able to stay. It feels good to know that, instead of wondering. But it’s terrifying to think of taking that step. You wonder when?? Something tells you that you’ll know. All at once it will just be time. The day comes. You step up and make the final decision. With trembling heart and voice but a deep and settled calm, you make that decision known.

And then, breaking hearts, disappointment, shock, fears realized, and many tears from those you love. You feel awful and it almost tears you to pieces. You wish so bad you didn’t have to do this to them. You are petrified of how many of the things they’re telling you might happen to you, actually might. Again, you pray and search and revisit the decision, and almost beg that you can go back on it, because it would instantly fix everything. Except how you feel deep in your heart. There are whispers of deep assurance, you begin to experience amazing and super-natural things like miracles of meeting up with just the right person who understands what you are facing. You read a verse from the Bible and immediately have a complete different understanding of it that fits and it’s just what you need. You feel like you’ve lost a lot of the support you’ve been leaning on your whole life. But there’s a new one moving in to take its place, and you are beginning to feel that.

Loved ones beg and plead with tears in their eyes for you to reconsider. It breaks your heart into a million pieces. You want to, to please them, to take away their suffering. But you can’t, you absolutely can’t. You try to explain yourself a little bit, and try to tell why you made this decision. Your words are met with dismissal. You find that you hold no legitimacy anymore. You only fit into one box - Wrong, Deceived, Lost, Dangerous. That is the only lens they can see you through. For a while you think they surely can feel the softness in my heart and I can reach them. But no, the decision you just made, to leave, is enough proof, and there is no way for them to feel anything else but that you are wrong. And so sooner or later, you realize there is no point in talking or discussing, because it only ends in pain. You have to make peace with your position, your label. You have to choose to love and forgive, and treat them with compassion and grace as much as possible. Things can look messy for a while in this process. You won’t make it through without being hurt and angry and offended, unless you’re numb to feeling. But those states don’t have to be permanent.

You see, they don’t understand that even if you walked away you do not consider them wrong. In their mind, one of you is right, and one is wrong. They are doing all they can to be on the right side (and many times they are sincere about it), and so there’s no other option but that you are wrong. They can’t grasp that you hold no judgment of them. That you are thrilled at their break-throughs and answered prayers. That you don’t see clothing or hairstyles anymore. They don’t understand that you don’t believe they are lost.

You start to be really quiet about the peace in your heart and your relationship with God, because for them, there’s no box for that - you’re deceived, end of story. And so you become content to hold it in your heart and experience it. To speak about it seems to cheapen it somehow.

The awkwardness is so yucky. It’s almost easier to stay away. But that is hard to. So it becomes a thing of “choose your hard”. The places that used to feel so safe and secure are suddenly scary and threatening. All eyes are on you. It feels like at any time someone could pull you into the corner and tell you how wrong you are. It’s hard to bear the label that makes it impossible for them to feel your heart. You get told over and over how much you are loved, but it’s confusing because it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like fear of what you’re doing and where you’re going.

You go through immense growing pains. Your relationships begin to shift, because everything has changed. The dynamics of your life are shifting under your feet. You might have marriage stress so severe it feels like it won’t work to hold it together. Your relationship with your children needs to get rewired as well, and that can be scary messy. You start to see the “real” in your world, and sometimes it’s not pretty.

To anyone going through this or thinking of what a decision like this might mean, my heart is with you. It’s real. But… this is not the end of the story. Watch for my next post.

And to anyone still in what we left, my heart is with you as well, and I love you. I respect you and am so happy for you if you are where you are at rest and can live your life to its fullest measure of joy. I truly hold no judgment for any of you. God needs people everywhere, and I only wish for everyone to follow where they are led.

In love to humanity, Rachel